Black people…The Default Group
I know what default means, but for curiosities sake I looked it up in the dictionary, well, online (although I do miss turning the pages of a Webster’s) and it states “ a pre-selected option adopted by a computer program or other mechanism when no alternative is specified by the user or programmer.”
When it comes to race relations (and one realizes that race is a SOCIAL construct for the purposes of DOMINATION of one group over another, the default definition certainly can apply here. Blacks have been a “pre-selected option adopted by a the dominant group (white) when there is no alternative.
Black people have been the default group in America for decades, especially when it involves crimes committed against the public. The dominant group tires of the chant “black lives matter” failing to realize that for years and years America has not even begun to dismantle the systemic forms of racial injustice found in our schools, government, employment, health, or within the criminal justice system that alienates “black lives.”
When I was living in Vancouver, a young woman (white) said she was assaulted by a black woman who threw acid on her face in a local park, in the summer of August 2010…I had a professor (who is black) at Clark College who had two young daughters and we were talking about the incident and she told me that she told her daughters to not even go near the park and stay close to home till they found the woman who accosted Bethany Storro. I didn’t understand why she told her daughters to do such a thing. In reality, Bethany had scarred her own face in hopes to get on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Bethany could of said a “woman” injured her, but chose to say a BLACK woman had injured her. Black women in town were subjected to random stops while walking and in cars. When all was said and done, her parents apologized to the community for what their daughter had put the police department through…HOWEVER, there were no apologies to the black women for what THEY had gone through…
Everyone was horrified when Susan Smith said she had been carjacked in South Carolina by a black man in October, 1994. Her two sons had been in the car with her and the black man drove off with them. For a week and a half, she pleaded for her son’s safety, to please bring them back home…once again, this white woman confessed to rolling her car into the nearby lake, with the children inside. But BLACK men were the focus of the manhunt for days…black men had cause to fear for their lives…
Another woman (white) called 911 saying her daughter and herself had been kidnapped by two BLACK men in a Cadillac in 2009. Bonnie Sweeten’s abduction caused a nationwide manhunt…but the authorities eventually found Sweeten and her daughter at Disney World…sigh…no abduction…NO TWO BLACK MEN…
I could go on with more stories, more examples of where black people have been used for discretionary purposes; the incidents of DEFAULT are certainly there, George Stinney, Central Park Five, Daryl Hunt, the Scottsboro Boys…
The system needs to change. We, as the peoples of the United States need to do more so that certain groups do not become the default because we have not updated our “programming”. If we don’t change, adapt, then our “system” breaks down…
